The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Your dashboard has 40 things on it. Your buyer has room for one.
A founder showed me his new product last week. Glass panels, soft gradients, a blue glow behind the chart. Best-looking thing I'd seen all month.
I asked what a user is supposed to do in the first 30 seconds.
Long pause.
That pause is what every new user feels. They just don't stay long enough to tell you about it.
Beautiful UI and clear UI are different skills. One wins design awards. The other wins the moment someone decides your software is worth learning.
So when I cut a product video, I never start with "how do we make this look premium." I start with: which single number on this screen changes a decision? Then I dim everything else.
Usually that means killing the visual weight of a screen the team spent four months building. That call is never fun.
But the cut gets 20 seconds shorter, and people stop asking what the product does.
Pretty is cheap now — everyone owns the same gradients.
Clarity is the last expensive thing.
#saasmarketing #productmarketing #motiondesign
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Trending
retrofuturism
Share your favorite designs from the past exploring the distant future. Or your own take on the aesthetic 🚀
halftone
Dots. Texture. Grain. Let's see your designs using the halftone technique.
Midjourney
Creatives are showing off what they're making with Midjourney.
colorgrade
Video editors sound off: How do you enhance the mood of your video in color grading?
Related posts
rediscovered some old favorites of mine, my first real ventures into any sort of motion design. these were our primary advertisement visuals for a private, fiction-based writing community around this time some 18 months ago. these featured archetypes that were requested as connections for members onsite to spice up our plot, offering an insight into the depth everyone has hiding behind their curated grids & posts, even if only in seeing what apps they have running in the background of their device, what notifications are enabled.
i have so much more material in the arsenal where this style comes from, & given our community's focus on interpersonal dynamics' impacts thanks to pressures from both social & news media sources (in spite of their potential unreliability, exaggerations, etc.), i haven't found a design system since that encapsulated the sort of 'ERROR 404' / 'uncanny valley' energy that we've always gone for in our storytelling, but in spite of content warning tags for glitching & potential eyestrain? lashback from external sources was far too severe to keep this style up & running for as long as i'd have liked.
what are your thoughts? any favorites of the four shown below? good start to an unconventional little case study, perhaps?
The ERROR 404 / uncanny valley angle is a clever way to visualize interpersonal dynamics without illustrating them literally. My favorite of the four is the top right, that cracked type treatment does a lot of storytelling on its own. Was the eyestrain pushback coming from...
Founder's Guide to Killer Design #5
A step-by-step section is one way to demo your B2B product fast
Your 3 Reasons Why: 🧐
1/ Shows value in under 30 seconds.
2/ Let buyers self-educate without sales.
3/ Makes complex b2b products feel simple.
A demo video right after the hero section still works too, but gives off early-stage vibes.
Hope it helps 😉
The step-by-step section lands hardest when each step is labeled by the outcome the user gets, not the feature name, so a skimmer can read just that column and still understand the product. That is what keeps it inside your under-30-seconds goal.
A small piece from a promo video I’ve been working on. Really liked how this color palette came together with the motion.
Would you go with this color scheme or try something different? 💭
agree, this color palette is so much fun! vibrant & familiar in all the right places without reading as a direct replica of extant work.